


to clarify the meat of his lessons

by suitablyskippy



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Canon-Typical Mindfuckery, Gen, Pre-Canon, Stalking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 11:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1776721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are five pastries in there, fattened with raisins and slathered in honey. Perhaps they are tasty. Taste is pleasure. Illumi has little familiarity with the concept of pleasure as derived from anything other than efficient contract killing, gratuitous bloodshed, and Killua’s complete obedience.</p><p>(Killua accepts a contract. Illumi takes it upon himself to supervise.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	to clarify the meat of his lessons

**Author's Note:**

> (I'm only about halfway through the manga at the moment, so it's more than possible that I've managed to contradict details from the latter half of canon--my apologies in advance if that's the case!)

Killua leaves by zeppelin at sunrise. Illumi observes his departure from the battlements, hands linked loosely behind his back, hair streaming out in the mountaintop wind like a singularly wide and silky length of suffocation fabric. He is satisfied to note that Killua does not wave to him once he has successfully rappelled to the passengers’ cabin slung beneath the vast grey body of the ship, nor once he has withdrawn his griphook and smashed open the window to clamber through. Killua does not, in fact, wave goodbye at all. Illumi would have appreciated, perhaps, if Killua had done so once his position inside the cabin was secured, to acknowledge Illumi’s careful surveillance and bid him a professional, brotherly farewell: but Killua is habitually ungrateful, after all. It is a defect of his to which Illumi is long-resigned. 

The zeppelin rises, a dark blot against the dawn until the murky clouds envelop it. Illumi gathers together a small cloth sack of variously useful disguise-based paraphernalia, and leaves by hangglider some hours later. 

It is a pleasant day for it. Any day would be a pleasant day for it. Circumstantial variables are irrelevant, as are weather conditions. He makes his landing in a barren, sleet-driven field of rock after a descent through wind like ice, and collapses the glider down until it is the size and approximate shape of a frisbee and can be fitted inside his small cloth sack. The glider is custom Zoldyck-made, for the assassin on the go. The small cloth sack is also custom Zoldyck-made. Illumi tends to leave it overnight to marinate in a creative blend of poisons, a practice which, to date, has permanently deterred thirty-one would-be bagsnatchers from both their lives of crime and their lives in general. 

He is a stocky, ginger-bearded farmer by the time he reaches the nearest town, and remains so for the duration of the ferry passage to the mainland. He is considerably taller, far less bearded, and ambiguously of the Northern Isles in bone structure while he rides the rattling cross-country train to the city, where he resumes his journey by foot with his jawline squared out and at least twenty years added in the sternly jutting overhang of his brow. By the time he contrives to run into Killua, in the market square half an hour’s walk from Erlbotek City’s zeppelin port, he has grown stoop-shouldered and old, although the circumstances require that he remove his pins and therefore he is compelled to wear sunglasses at all times, to conceal his ink-blot eyes. 

“Whoa!” says Killua, jolting backward like a boy without ten years of brutal reflex training in his skillset. He barely avoids collision with a trestle table of cheaply filigreed earrings. He conceals his true abilities perfectly. 

“Oh, oh, oh,” Illumi quavers, in monotonous, elderly woe. He raises his hands and lets his walking stick clatter to the cobblestones. “You’ll forgive an old man his blindness, won’t you, child? You’ll accept my apologies for not spotting you a-walking my way?”

“Sure, no problem,” says Killua, who has a grease-stained paper bag cradled lovingly to his chest. He stoops to retrieve Illumi’s walking stick from the street. There is a suspicious dusting of white flakes on the fingers of his other hand when he hands it back. “You’re okay, right? I didn’t step on your foot or anything?”

“Right as rain,” says Illumi, in his quavery old man voice. “What’s in your bag, child?”

Killua hesitates for barely a moment. Then, “A bunch of fancy pastries,” he says, and opens up the bag to prove it, grinning down at his pastries like he can’t help himself. 

Illumi secures the bridge of his sunglasses with one wrinkled, elderly finger, and peers in. There are five pastries in there, fattened with raisins and slathered in honey. Perhaps they are tasty. Taste is pleasure. Illumi has little familiarity with the concept of pleasure as derived from anything other than efficient contract killing, gratuitous bloodshed, and Killua’s complete obedience. 

“They’re _amazing_ ,” Killua adds enthusiastically, when Illumi offers no response. “I’ve been daydreaming about getting my hands on some of these for years. You know it’s the only place on the continent you can get them? Cos the honey, it’s like—it’s the way they raise the bees? It’s special to this region. Makes it taste better. I read about it,” he says. He continues to grin. It is a gap-toothed grin. He lost his front teeth years ago, long before his adult teeth were ready to grow in, during a month of fully immersive simulated interrogation conducted by Illumi and a pair of pliers. 

“May I consume one?”

The grin falters. Illumi is momentarily disappointed that _kindness to strangers_ will not be among the many areas in which he must thoroughly re-educate Killua on his return. But then the grin returns, brighter than before, and Killua offers up the bag as gladly as any mother might offer up her newborn to the sprung-steel jaws of its very first beartrap. “Help yourself, old man! I was gonna buy more anyway.”

Killua has always been a troublesome child. 

 

+++

 

The bakery, when he finds it, is small, and could perhaps be termed cosy, were _cosy_ a concept with which Illumi possessed any more intimate a familiarity than _homely_ or _welcoming_ —or, for that matter, _intimate familiarity_. A curtain of red beads separates the shopfront from the storeroom at the back. Illumi drags the baker’s corpse into the storeroom, beads rattling and clattering behind him, and props it against a stack of trays piled high with iced buns, its head lolling on its snapped neck. After a moment of study, he adjusts his pins and assumes the corpse’s pre-death appearance: sallow, bewhiskered. 

Some hours later, Killua breezes in through the open door. He is pink-cheeked and breathless, the wind in his hair. “Hey!” he says, “hey! Me again—could I get another five of those? The hopberry ones? And—”

Killua contemplates his options, palms pressed flat against the glass-fronted counter. His eyes are shining, as keen and bright as Milluki’s the day he received his first cat-o’-nine-tails. “Chocolate and sabre fruit,” he decides. He glances up at Illumi, who stands in the baker’s apron at the baker’s till, and grins. “In two separate bags? If that’s okay?”

“I’m afraid it’s not,” says Illumi. 

“Oh, well—in the same bag, then, I don’t mind.”

“They are not for sale,” Illumi says, rounding out the vowels of the baker’s plummy Erlbotek City accent. 

Killua’s nose wrinkles. “How come, mister? I bought some just this morning.”

Illumi slaps heavy-knuckled hands flat against the countertop. A cloud of flour erupts around them and settles, slowly, like arsenic powder caught up gently in a building’s air vents. The entire room shimmers with the hypnotically toxic force of his nen. “Do you question the wisdom of a baker, little one?” 

“What?” says Killua. “No— _no_ , of course not, I’m sure you know what’s best. It’s just—” It seems for a moment as though he will argue, but the moment passes. His shoulders slump, weighted with discontent. “You should take all those pastries out the display, then. You’re only gonna keep disappointing people.”

The noxious haze of killing intent recedes. Illumi would not have resorted to it, had this form been taller; it is inconvenient to lack the height necessary to loom over Killua. “I will take your suggestions under advisement,” he says. He pushes his sunglasses up the flat bridge of the baker’s nose. “Good day, child.”

Killua nods, disconsolate, and slopes out. 

 

+++

 

A piece of historical waterboarding apparatus stands in a dungeon of the Zoldyck castle’s sub-sub-basement, and has done so for centuries: an heirloom, regarded by Illumi with something as close to fondness as he is capable. Recently, with the assistance of their grandfather, he reinforced the surface of the apparatus—exchanged the leather restraint straps on the board itself for titanium, and placed a shipment order for ten litres of hydrochloric acid once it became apparent that the last of the castle’s supply had been used up by their mother in lacing the family’s midsummer feast.

Illumi had requested that Zeno not tell Killua of the acidboarding apparatus, so that its existence could be used to surprise him at a later date; Zeno, chuckling, had agreed. Illumi had thought of saving it until Killua’s birthday, perhaps—until the night of the New Year, when the festivities of the villages at the foot of Kukuroo Mountain grow so loud they are audible from the Zoldyck grounds, and fireworks light the darkness—until a celebration, a special occasion—when Killua would be most grateful for Illumi’s assistance in driving all thought from his mind to replace it with the sensation of choking to death on his own half-drowned, soft-tissue-eroding bile.

Now, with some regret, Illumi sets those plans aside. It is clear the situation is far more urgent than he had anticipated. They cannot afford to wait. He will introduce Killua to the apparatus immediately upon his return, and clarify for him, once more, the meat of his lessons.

Killua is a quick learner, and always has been. It is unfortunate that he is equally as quick to forget what he has learned, and always has been. He is lucky to have a teacher as tolerant as Illumi. 

 

+++

 

The assassination itself is clean and competent, of course. Illumi watches through binoculars from the roof of a nearby zeppelin repair shop as Killua vaults out the target’s window to land, neatly, on the target’s garage roof, and from there launches himself to the target’s garden fence, which he takes at a precarious run with his arms outstretched, claws bloody and as yet unretracted, yo-yo a heavy weight in the pocket of his shorts. He hurls himself from the fence into the cover of deep undergrowth and disappears from sight, though Illumi long since upgraded Killua’s basic mission kit to include a tracking device, and so Killua is never quite as far from the family’s attention as he might suppose. 

 

+++

 

Killua takes lodgings in the city hotel. Illumi presses pins carefully between his ribs and follows him, now a foot and a half shorter and seemingly ten years younger, newly possessed of copperish curls and an unthreatening overbite. Waiting at the front desk, they strike up conversation—Illumi will be travelling on the 06.20 zeppelin to Wyngulta in the morning—no way! Killua, too, though it’s such an early departure he almost just decided to camp out in the zeppelin port itself overnight—at which remark Illumi laughs, and though laughter comes as dry and unpractised from this mouth as it does from every mouth he uses, Killua brightens with delight to hear it. 

“Wanna walk down there together?” Killua offers, room card poised above his room’s lock. “In the morning? If we’re both gonna be going that way already, we may as well, right?”

“It would be my pleasure,” says Illumi, in the clear high pitch of pre-pubescence. He shuts himself into his own room and listens to the sound of Killua, next door, flopping directly into bed instead of forcing himself awake and training until the small grey hours of the morning.

Illumi postpones his own sleep until the dawn begins to rise, and then wakes before it has risen, barely half an hour later. The first rays of pale sunlight stretch out over Erlbotek City. Unblinking, he sits at the edge of his bed. He waits.

When Killua knocks at his door his pale hair is still sleep-ruffled; he offers Illumi a greeting that deteriorates, halfway, into a yawn. Various of Illumi’s training regimens have made it so that Killua is able to go seventy-two hours without sleep and still maintain peak performance, and another twenty-four after that at a level of performance only marginally lower; and, that aside, having a soft mattress on which to rest himself rather than a net hammock slung above a pit of spikes should still have ensured Killua a more restful sleep than perhaps any other he has ever known. Illumi is gratified to find that this much of Killua’s public conduct, at least, is a façade. 

Their shadows stretch out before them, endlessly long in the morning sunlight, as they make their way to the terminal. The streets are empty. The sounds of the city are barely beginning to unfold. Killua swings his yo-yo and talks, idly, of the fictitious mother he is returning to, and of the fictitious aeronautical mechanics apprenticeship he came to Erlbotek to apply to, and of his several fictitious and beloved younger sisters. Illumi carefully sifts through the lies for any grains of truth: he finds very few, and is gratified once more with Killua’s commitment to the assassin’s practice of deception.

Neither of them has bags to stow, so they pass through security and directly into the belly of the ship. Killua swings his feet as they wait for take-off, and Illumi spins his own story of a fictitious father—a baker—and fictitious mother—also a baker—and his fictitious reasons for being alone in Erlbotek—all related to baking—and behind the open delight with which Killua swallows this story there is a layer of cold and hardened envy. Illumi observes this with no particular interest. Killua may wish the fictitious life of a stranger for his own, but it is not his own, and it will never be his own, and so his desire to possess it is irrelevant. The helium jets activate with a sudden, juddering blast. The ship begins to lift.

“I don’t even know your name,” says Killua, voice raised above the racket. 

“Nor I yours,” says Illumi, sing-song. 

“Zeffin,” says Killua. 

“Angopa,” says Illumi. 

Killua laughs, and offers his hand to shake. An affectation of adulthood, a mockery. Illumi accepts it. 

The journey passes. 

 

+++

 

A half-dozen hours later, Killua rouses himself from the doze he has permitted himself to slide into, unpeels his cheek from the window-glass, and bids Illumi farewell. The ship is docked at the Tozykkta terminal, a ferry journey and some four hours hike from Kukuroo Mountain; it will take Killua another two hours or so after that to hike his way up through the mountain’s dense jungle to the castle itself. It is a tactical disembarkation, at least: far enough from Kukuroo that his fellow passengers are unlikely to ever think of connecting him to the name of Zoldyck.

Illumi moves into Killua’s vacated window seat and peers out, at the grey asphalt expanse of the zeppelin terminal laid out below. Sunshine dazzles from white hair. Down on the landing zone, Killua has tipped back his head and shielded his eyes, squinting up toward the zeppelin as Illumi peers down: and Killua must catch Illumi’s gaze, for he grins—suddenly— _hugely_ —and waves energetically as the helium jets begin their violent hiss.

Killua believes he is waving at a boy his own age—a stranger, his travel companion. He is not. Illumi looks down at him, expressionless. After a moment, Killua’s face falls, and so does his hand, and so must his hopes: for he turns and walks away with confused dejection in every line of his back.

Five stops later, Illumi himself disembarks. Dowlytkio terminal is only a short walk from the humid fringes of the jungle and consequently congested by tourists, their gaily-striped shirtsleeves fluttering in the sunny mid-afternoon breeze and their camera shutters snapping. Hidden behind the baggage reclaim building, he returns to his own height with a particularly unpleasant contorting and untwisting of his spine; then he narrows his shoulders, stoutens his torso, turns his hair to greying, flowing waves and thoroughly obscures the default structure of his face, and steps out in a brightly floral-patterned shirt.

He purchases a ticket for the next guided bus tour to the base of Kukuroo Mountain. He is home within the hour. 

 

+++

 

The sound of Killua returning home echoes through the castle, because Killua possesses an unfortunate tendency to violently kick the huge arched doors open whenever he returns. Wood slams against stone. The hinges scream. The dull, echoing thuds of Killua stamping up the stairs are shortly after replaced by the sound of rapid flight, and Killua presumably evading the several feral-looking sabre-toothed tigers their father trapped within his bedroom in his absence. Two floors up, in the dingy gloom of the secondary sitting room, Illumi continues sharpening his knives.

The footsteps find their way to him, soon enough.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Killua demands. 

Illumi regards him. Killua hovers in the doorway, scowling in. Illumi continues to regard him, eyes flat and blank as ink. Killua scuffs his foot against the flagged stone floor, and seems, for a moment, about to speak—but doesn’t, and scowls deeper instead.

“It is good to see you home, Kil,” Illumi says, at last. “We must talk. Sit down.”

In a show of petty wilfulness, Killua does not sit down.

“Killua.”

“Talk about _what_?” Killua says, suspiciously.

Suspicion is a virtue in Killua only when targeted in directions that are not Illumi’s. Illumi takes back up the carving knife and whetstone with which he had been working when Killua first arrived upon the scene. He resumes sharpening; he does not turn his blank-eyed regard from Killua. “The reports from your latest contract have been disappointing, Kil.”

“You’ve got _reports_?”

“Extremely disappointing ones.”

A flicker crosses Killua’s expression—perhaps realisation of the situation’s gravity, perhaps panic at its inevitable consequences—but then his training slams down like the weighted blade of Milluki’s guillotine, and composure returns. He turns up his palms towards Illumi. He raises a sceptical eyebrow. “Look, I dunno what you think you heard, but I killed the guy, didn’t I? Isn’t that what matters?”

“Did you have a nice time while you were away?”

At the abrupt change in topic, Killua hesitates. “... Sure?” he says. “I mean—yeah. It was pretty good, yeah.”

“That’s so great,” says Illumi. He tips his head. He smiles. “I’m so glad to hear it, Kil. That’s just what the reports said. You, having fun.”

Like a target who has suddenly realised, from the presence of a hatchet-wielding Zoldyck in his bedroom, that he is a target, Killua freezes—muscles visibly tightening and joints locking. The secondary sitting room has been filling with the hypnotic, smoggy effluence of Illumi’s intimidation ever since Killua arrived. All at once, Killua seems to notice it. 

“I didn’t have fun,” Killua says. The panic in his voice rises as Illumi does. “I _swear_ I didn’t! I clawed the guy’s throat out and dumped him on his sofa, that’s all I did—it _is_!” he insists, looking all the way up at Illumi, who stands over him now in the seething eye of his toxic nen. “Your reports must mean that I had fun killing him—which I _did_ , totally—nothing else, I didn’t have fun doing _anything_ else—”

“Do you mean it?” Illumi asks. 

Killua’s stare is panicked. “Yes?” 

“I wish I could believe you,” says Illumi, and sighs a sigh that, while not quite heartfelt, does not at all betray the absence of _heartfelt_ from the repertoire of emotions Illumi has ever found himself capable of experiencing. “Come along.”

He steps past Killua into the hallway and allows his nen to dissipate, so that Killua takes a gasp for breath like a drowning child and slumps against the doorjamb as though his strings were cut—which they were not, and will never be, since Killua is Illumi’s and Illumi’s alone and he has no plans to ever cede control. He continues on his way. 

After a moment, Killua shoves himself back upright and takes a step that staggers, and another that doesn’t, and then he follows after Illumi into the torchlit gloom of the hallway. “Where are we going?” 

“Downstairs.”

“Where downstairs?” 

“Quite some way downstairs,” Illumi says. He looks about him as they go, sweeping his gaze vacantly across the stonework in case of fresh-laid traps. Killua’s breathing persists in sounding ragged. “There is no need to be so wary, Kil. The consequences of your actions will hurt me far more than they hurt you.”

Killua mutters something through gritted teeth. It sounds like _Yeah, right_. 

“Oh, it’s quite true,” Illumi assures him distantly. “In terms of disappointment, at least. In terms of physical pain, I imagine you will be far worse off.”

Killua does not respond. Illumi looks down and sees him trudging at his side, hands in fists, shoulders hunched. The back of his head is damp right through with sweat when Illumi rests his hand against it; the scalp beneath that coarse pale hair is cold and clammy. 

“Everything you’re feeling is superfluous,” Illumi reassures him. He has moulded the contents of Killua’s skull as regularly as he moulds the contours of his own, and he knows that Killua knows this: but Killua has always been given to rejecting his lessons. 

“You think _everything’s_ superfluous,” Killua says bitterly. 

“Not everything,” Illumi corrects. “Not you, for example.”

“Not—” Killua begins, and hesitates. His face screws up into a paroxysm of something useless.

“Not you,” Illumi confirms. “Of course, your hopes, dreams, desires, beliefs, emotions, and sense of personal entitlement to independence and free will are all absolutely redundant—” and he heaves up the barred iron trapdoor to the dungeon passageway, which collides against the floor with the kind of deafening, bone-jarring _thud_ that half a tonne of steel colliding with two foot of stone tends to make, “—so this evening we will be working to eradicate them. Come along, Kil.”

Killua hesitates again, for a moment, before he obeys. He has always been a problem child.


End file.
